Editorial: A daunting, necessary challenge

“Out from the heavens, planes were flying very, very low and threw bombs right on the playground. Where there was laughter and sunshine, there was nothing. ... I never seen those kids anymore.”

This is not an eyewitness account of soldiers for the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant capturing Syrian and Iraqi cities and slaughtering children, among hundreds of others, in the last few weeks. It could be — but this recitation of horrors is both nearer in space and more distant in time.

This is Barbara Turkeltaub of Canton, describing at a Walsh University workshop this week the Nazi bombing of her hometown, Vilna, Poland, in 1941, when she was a preschool child.

The Walsh session was designed to help teachers to understand the complexities of the Holocaust and more recent genocides. Turkeltaub, as The Rep’s story Friday noted, is believed to be the last Holocaust survivor in Canton. What a precious resource she is, just as surviving Allied soldiers in World War II are. She was there, and there is a power to her indelible recollections that no other source of history can claim.

We don’t envy the 35 teachers attending the workshop their challenge: translating what they learned into lessons that children can bear to learn. Contemplating the most evil acts of humankind is too much to bear for many adults, after all.

But this was a wise course of action for Walsh and the Ohio school districts, including seven in Stark County, that sent teachers to the workshop.

No doubt many of us have had experience with history taught badly. But it’s hard to imagine more damaging lessons than those that perpetuate bigotry in an attempt to explain it. The Rep’s story gave as one example an assignment at a New York school to write essays on “why Jews were evil.”

We compliment Walsh on its contribution to the teachers’ understanding of why the Holocaust occurred, and why genocide has continued, somewhere in the world, to this very minute. And we compliment the school districts and teachers who accepted this daunting challenge.